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In Act I Helen lands in the enchanted island of Leuce, and is found watching the ship that brought her sailing away with the dead Menelaus, for he, being altogether mortal, may not follow her there. The Chorus tells the story of Helen, her rape by Theseus, her marriage with Menelaus, her flight with Paris, the tragedy of Troy and her return to Argos.
Since times and places were of no account, he might have been coming, as he came five years ago, to hear her judgement on his neo-classic drama. Strange and great things had happened to his genius since that day. Between Helen in Leuce and the Nine and Twenty Sonnets there lay the newly discovered, heavenly countries of the soul. "Well," he said, glancing at the poems, as he seated himself.
You have been a good friend to my poems from the first, one of those whose approbation has been a real source of pleasure to me. There are things which I should like to do in poetry before I die, and of which lines and bits have long been done, in particular Lucretius, St. Alexius, and the journey of Achilles after death to the Island of Leuce; but we accomplish what we can, not what we will."
"Well, when you think you've got hold of a genius, and you take him up and stake your reputation on him and all the time you can't be sure whether it's a spark of the divine fire or a mere flash in the pan. It happens over and over again. The burnt critic dreads the divine fire." His eyes were fixed on the title page as if fascinated by the words, Helen in Leuce.
The incessant successful production of Saturnalia would have been prejudicial to the interests of The Museion; a series of triumphant Helens in Leuce would have turned Rickman aside for ever from the columns of Metropolis; but Jewdwine told himself that he had nothing to fear from the rivalries of the modern Tragic Muse.
She remembered how when Horace had first told her of the subject, Helen in Leuce, she had looked it up in Lemprière, found a reference in Homer and another in Euripides, had shaken her head and said, "What can he make of that?" Now for the first time she saw what he had made of it. Rickman's Helen was to the Helena of Euripides what Shelley's Prometheus is to the Prometheus of Æschylus.
But if you had to publish, why couldn't you bring out your Helen in Leuce? It was far finer than anything you have here." "Yes. Helen's all right now." His tone implied only too plainly that she was not all right when Jewdwine had approved of her. "Now? What on earth have you been doing to her?" "Only putting a little life into her limbs. But Vaughan wouldn't have her at any price."
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